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Henrietta Black
---- |history= Born of the unlikely coupling of the heir-apparent to the Marquisate of Townshend and an Eastern European circus acrobat, Henrietta Black had what can best be described as an unlikely childhood. Unfortunately, the best parts, the parts where she had two adoring, blissfully happy parents head-over-heels in love with each other, happened early enough that she only has the haziest of impressions of them. Before her fourth birthday, the both of them had died in a terrible car crash, leaving her to be raised in the care of her grandfather, the Marquis of Townshend. To say that her grandfather had not approved of her blue-blooded father’s marriage to her disreputable mother would be an understatement, but despite that he proved a doting grandparent to his clever, curious and sometimes boisterous granddaughter. Everything changed a second time when Henrietta received a postcard from her late mother at age twelve. During the ensuing tearful row with her grandfather, it came out that her mother didn’t die as she’d always been told but instead had been banished by her patrician grandfather because he blamed her for the death of his son. After spending several hours absorbing this news, Henrietta did what any intrepid twelve year old girl would do: She ran away to join the circus and find her mother. Now, lots of kids run away to join the circus, but few have the fortitude to stick it out for more than a night or two. Henrietta was the exception to that rule, spending the next four years touring with various shady Eastern European circus companies and graduating from trick riding to trapeze and tight rope walking acts. But in all that time she never managed to find more than rumors about her missing mother. At sixteen a letter from her uncle announced that her grandfather had died. With so little to show for her search, she finally returned home to forgive and mourn her late grandfather. With a modest inheritance and no more mysterious postcards forthcoming, Henrietta made up for four years of late homework with a diligence that eventually brought her to Oxford. After her strange upbringing, Henrietta was particularly interested in the workings of the human mind, particularly the human propensity for lies and deception. Consequently, she worked her way through dual doctorates in Psychology and Sociology, becoming an expert on things like body language, word choice and micro-expressions. After all this work, Henrietta is convinced that her years of study account for her eerily accurate ability to determine what the people around her are feeling. Henrietta is at least partially mistaken about this, as her low level empathetic abilities are more directly the result of one of her Oxford classmate’s experiments on her, conducted under the guise of a sleep study that she has long forgotten ever participating in. Having a very convenient rationale to explain her ability to herself, she’s so far had very few occasions where she had to question her abilities. After writing several scholarly papers on topics ranging from deception detection to the impact of stress on human emotional states, she was ultimately recruited by SHIELD, which she took to eagerly. Initially her training took place at the communications academy, but as it became more apparent that she had at least some physical capabilities as well, she was transferred to Operations to complete her training. Since then she’s had a number of years of experience in the field, and has spent a good deal of time as a liaison to MI-6 where she worked closely and frequently with Pete Wisdom for several years. Consequently, he is one of her few and rare trusted relationships. Her specialty as a reader of people and deception expert means that she has been shifted around a good deal as situations dictate, which has perhaps complicated her preexisting difficulties establishing trusting personal relationships with others. Still, in her seven-plus years at SHIELD she has consistently performed well and made valuable contributions to whatever team she’s been assigned to. She’s just been transferred to New York, a place she has no previous experience with, and is both nervous and excited to be working with the upper echelons of SHIELD leadership. }} Category:Character Category:OC Category:Hero Category:Registered-Real-Name